Originally published in Jewish Social Studies, January 1966, pp. 57-60.
JACOBS, LOUIS. Principles of the Jewish Faith. New York. Basic Books, Inc. 1964. Pp. xii, 473.
This is a masterly attempt to reinterpret the thirteen articles of faith laid down by the great medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides in such a way as to make them acceptable to the modern thinking Jew. The first five principles—God’s existence, unity, incorporeality, eternity, and exclusive claim to be worshipped— “present no offense at all to the modern mind” (p. 456), Jacobs claims. The next four principles, dealing respectively with prophecy, belief in Moses as the greatest of the prophets, and in the divine origin and immutability of the Torah, are not so simple. “As we have seen,” Jacobs writes (p. 457), “there is no doubt at all that for two thousand years what is now called the ‘fundamentalist’ view prevailed, according to which the Pentateuch was written at divine dictation and is infallible in all its parts. It is the very Word of God, this term being interpreted in a strictly literal fashion. This is still the belief of many believing Jews but, as we have seen, unquestioned though such a belief was in Maimonides’ day, it is not intellectually respectable today and has been abandoned by all who are aware of the facts . . . Our basic contention is that it is not origins which matter but what those institutions have come to mean in Jewish life and their capacity to serve as vehicles for the divine.” The prophets were thus inspired, but not infallibly. Moses was the greatest Jewish leader ever, but not in the sense envisaged by the medievalists. “Judaism is a dynamic faith” (p. 458), which means that the immutability of the Torah cannot be taken literally for “there have been internal changes brought about by changing conditions.” With regard to God knowing the thoughts and deeds of men (tenth principle), Jacobs feels that “we are obliged to practice a proper humility and to acknowledge that here is an area beyond the grasp of the finite human mind” (p. 458). The eleventh principle with its insistence that God rewards and punishes “demands . . . an interpretation which does not conceive of God as vindictive,” the stricter medieval doctrine of Divine Judgment thereby being relinquished. The modern Jew, Jacobs argues, in respect of the belief in the advent of the Messiah (twelfth principle) need not reject this notion out of hand. “There is certainly no a priori reason why God should not usher in the redemption by means of a person . . .” (p. 395). Indeed, many moderns prefer to believe “in a more direct divine intervention than was implied in the nineteenth-century idea of automatic human progress towards the millennium” (p. 458). Finally the belief in the resurrection of the dead (thirteenth principle) can only be accepted as an affirmation of belief in the immortality of the soul “provided that this is understood to mean that the whole personality of man, his complete individuality, shares in God’s eternal goodness” (p. 459).
Dr. Jacobs is a scholar of distinction, thoroughly versed not only in Judaica—especially Rabbinics and Jewish mystical literature—but also in secular subjects—especially modern theology. Principles of Jewish Faith is more than a book. It is a library. Using Maimonides’ principles as pegs he has hung onto all these classical themes of Jewish religious concern meticulous and exhaustive dissertations. His analysis of the second Maimonidean principle, for example, leads to a thoroughgoing survey of Jewish commentary on the Shema drawn from a remarkable variety of sources. His exposition of the eighth principle leads into a comprehensive account of the origins and current state of Bible criticism. His consideration of the twelfth principle develops into a survey of traditional and modern views on messianism, with shrewd observations on Zionism. These are but a few examples. Nor do these lengthy, detailed, and rigorous essays descend into intellectual exhibitionism as is so often the case in this kind of work. Jacobs is taking into consideration the needs of the average reader, who will be grateful for what is possibly one of the best and most ample existing introductions to Jewish thought extant. The author takes nothing for granted—which, in the sphere of Jewish education, is a wise principle, often overlooked. As for his excursus to each theme, with their careful bibliographies, they are mines of information and will be a source of satisfaction to study groups for years to come. Moreover, within the framework of these addenda, telling points are constantly made. It is high time the “method” of the late Drs. Hertz and Epstein in the sphere of religious apologetics was exposed. The author deflates but never destroys, withal in charity and with great intellectual honesty and integrity.
Yet the claim of the publishers that the book is “a major contribution to twentieth-century theology” cannot be upheld. It is an apologia pro sua vita theologica on the part of the distinguished author. What, in the last analysis, is the criterion which he adopts to distinguish between principles of faith which may be reconstructed and those which are eternal? He draws what is on any reckoning a subjective distinction between “traditional beliefs which cannot be contradicted by new knowledge” and traditional beliefs which can. Among the former he includes belief in God, in His goodness and mercy, in His unity and power, that He has revealed Himself to Israel in the Torah, that Israel has a special role to play in the fulfilment of God’s purpose, that the messianic age will dawn, that the soul is immortal, that God is to be worshipped, that man is to practice justice and righteousness and to strive to be holy and feel compassion for others. These traditional beliefs which cannot be contradicted by new knowledge are contrasted with traditional beliefs which can be contradicted by new knowledge such as “the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the Isaianic authorship of the second part of the book of Isaiah, the Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and the Song of Songs and the Davidic authorship of the Psalms, that the Rabbis of the Talmud were infallible supermen, that the world is no more than five thousand seven hundred and twenty-three years old, that the earth is flat and in the centre of the universe” (p. 459). Jacobs continues: “The basic beliefs, which cannot by their nature be contradicted by new knowledge, are known, in part at least, through tradition, but they are accepted by believing Jews not because they are traditional but because they are true. Their nature is such that new knowledge—which is knowledge based on the discovery of new facts—cannot possibly contradict them, since they do not purport to supply information about the structure of the material universe, but about the meaning of human life. No amount of investigation into the facts can either prove or disprove the existence of God, for example. The man who believes in God does so not because any particular facts or set of facts lead to this belief but because it seems to him to be the only possible explanation of the facts as a whole” (p. 460). We sympathize with Jacobs’ predicament. Once the fundamentalist position is abandoned, we are inevitably in the quicksands of relativity so long as we continue to analyze Judaism in terms of traditional categories. Jacobs wants to cry halt. These are interpretive beliefs, he passionately argues, not factual. But one man’s factual belief is another man’s interpretive and vice versa. The idea of the Chosen People is a factual belief in extremis for the present writer. Its origin, genesis development and current irrelevance to the Jewish condition can be accounted for by reference to the same kinds of laws which govern the motions of the stars in their courses. It is a belief, in other words, which suffered a fate from the study of comparative religion and especially Freudian psychology comparable to the fate suffered by the belief in an infallible Torah from Higher and Lower Criticism. Either all religious beliefs are interpretive and beyond the reach of facts or none are and must accordingly justify themselves before the bar of reason—and reality. Indeed, taking the approach to Judaism as a religion which governs the whole of Jacobs’ analysis, he would do well to follow the interpretive belief approach to religion (developed so brilliantly by Professor John Wisdom of Cambridge University in the essay on “Gods” in his Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis [1953]) which removes religious judgments entirely from the realm of facts. Otherwise his argument inevitably leads to subjective preference. The Jew brought up against a certain kind of background will inevitably decide which “dogmas” are essential for him and then proceed to justify them in terms of a systematic philosophy. Most reason in religious writings is thoroughly grounded on unreason. We all make our little leaps. But this is autobiography rather than theology. We are no nearer a solution of the problem of history versus theology (or factual belief versus interpretive belief) with which Jacobs sets out than when we started: “We can neither try to reject totally all the insights of the historical school, without much hope of success, and go back to a dogmatism without roots in Jewish history, or we can try to build a Jewish theology based on firm historical foundations” (p. 6). But this is a false alternative. There is a third possibility: that the stability of Judaism for almost four thousand years resides not in certain specific “true beliefs,” but in the continuity of an historically identifiable people whose ideas on God and human destiny have altered far more radically than the neo-historical school would have us believe, but who yet maintained and continue to maintain stability by having an identity of peoplehood, rather than of ideology, in change. In fact the greatest criticism that can be levelled against Jacobs is that his universe of discourse has a distinctly Victorian flavor. The voice is the voice of Jacobs but the hands often seem to be the hands of Joseph. Dewey, Rapaport, Wieman are not mentioned; Kaplan has been dealt with in an earlier book (p. 133)! Not once does the author consider whether there can be an equivalence of function between two ostensibly radically opposed religious ideas. Yet surely if we are to avoid the relativism which relinquishing the fundamentalist position inevitably leads to we might at least consider other hypotheses which “save the phenomena” of Jewish history and religious experience without resorting to theological epicycloids. As one might expect, religious naturalism is dismissed perfunctorily (pp. 127, 128) : “Conventional Theists have rightly pointed out the semantic confusion to which this kind of thinking leads and have not hesitated to call the affirmation of a non-supernatural God atheism, even though the advocates of such a position angrily deny the charge.” All well and good, but at the end of Jacobs’ book one is still not too clear what his Theos is, and what He was doing between 1939 and 1945. To rebut religious naturalism in 1965 should be to go beyond religious naturalism rather than retrench behind it.
I am convinced that the reactions to this book will largely depend on the religious status of the reader. It is, after all, a courageous attempt to resolve some of the apparently irresolvable problems posed by the clash between medieval Judaism and the modern world—and these tensions are felt most deeply in the recesses of a man’s soul, especially when that man was reared in orthodoxy. We salute Dr. Jacobs for his vigorous determination to find a path in a Jewish community where so many of those who should know better are not even aware that there is a problem in the first place or, if they are aware, make a virtue of turning their backs on it.
Society for the Advancement of Judaism, New York.
Alan W. Miller.